I reach Oliver Sacks at a hotel in Ithaca, New York. Normally, the celebrated neurologist and author of such marvelously readable science books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lives, writes and practices medicine in New York City. There he makes the occasional house call ("I like house calls. I think they're crucial.") and, time permitting, sees all comers as patients. ("I'm not snooty about seeing only certain exotic syndromes; I'm happy to see people with slipped disks, cricks in their necks or anything else.")

But for the next couple of weeks, until he sallies forth on what he calls "another neurological adventure," or until his publisher packs him off to San Francisco to promote his newest and most engagingly idiosyncratic book, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks is enjoying a sort of scholar's idyll at Cornell. "Yesterday I met with a botanist, a class of psychology students interested in color vision and a freshman writing class," he says. "Today I'm going to witness some high-pressure physics, and then there's a Greek mythology class."

With such a wide range of interests and the ability to write in interesting ways about any or all of them, it's no great surprise that Sacks succeeds in Uncle Tungsten at taking the seemingly dull topic of chemistry and turning it into a great adventure. In Uncle Tungsten it's Sacks' own boyhood enthusiasm for all things chemical that provides the narrative energy. Sacks writes with intelligence, passion and even humor about key personalities and turning points in the history of chemistry and topics ranging from metals and minerals to photography and spectroscopy. ("I've been investigating the campus with my pocket spectroscope!" Sacks exclaims at one point in our conversation. "I'm delighted to find that in my room here at Cornell there are four sorts of light.")

Sacks grew up in an exceptionally accomplished Anglo-Jewish family. His grandfather invented the Landau lamp, a crucial safety innovation in coal mining. Both of his parents were doctors. His Uncle Dave—the Uncle Tungsten of the title—was an inveterate experimenter with metals and lightbulbs (his nickname came from the tungsten his light bulb factory used for filaments). His first cousin was Abba Eban, former Israeli foreign minister.

While the chapters Sacks devotes to describing his family and homelife do not dwell on his inner life, he does reveal himself in bits and pieces: that almost from birth he was expected to become a doctor and that, eager to begin his training, his mother had him dissecting human fetuses by the age of 11, which horrified him; that his Uncle Tungsten and his more eccentric and intellectually forbidding Uncle Abe, rather than his parents, shaped and abetted his growth as a boy chemist; that he was sent as a child to a boarding school outside of London during World War II, and was abused by a tyrannical headmaster.

Overriding the darker moments is Sacks' unalloyed enthusiasm for the discoveries of science. Who else, for example, could rhapsodize so insightfully about the development of the periodic table? ("The feelings that all the elements could be elegantly and economically related to one another in terms of their physical and chemical properties and that they fell into natural groups and that there was also this mysterious periodicity as one went up in atomic weight was the most exciting thing I'd ever encountered," Sacks says. "It gave me strong feelings of cosmic order."

Sacks says he was a scribbler, a keeper of journals, from way back. Relying on the early journals and reconducting his old—often stinky and explosive—experiments, Sacks has sought to re-create here his boyhood adventures in chemistry. For him Uncle Tungsten is "a mixture of the reminiscent impulse and perhaps a pedagogic one. I would like to imagine that there are other 10 and 12 and 14-year-old boys and girls who find resonance and excitement in such discoveries. I want to retrace a journey into wonder."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

To the winners go the sports biographies; to the losers go the deathly quiet locker rooms, the self-flagellation, the proverbial kiss from your sister. As a result, we know a whole lot more about the thrill of victory than the agony of defeat.

Pat Conroy didn't set out to rectify that inequity by writing My Losing Season, a painfully detailed memoir of his senior year on the 1966-67 Citadel Bulldogs basketball squad that soldiered through an ignominious 8-17 season. Call it a requiem for all the runners-up who, like Conroy, turned defeat on the playing field into victory in other aspects of their lives.

As a fast, street-hardened 5-foot-10 point guard, Conroy was a fiery competitor who always believed he could play above his physical limitations and frequently did. Like his teammates, Conroy didn't lose well. Unlike the others, however, he found a way to learn something from each defeat that would make him a better ballplayer.

His steely resolve in the face of such a spirit-crushing season ultimately gave him the self-confidence to become one of America's best-loved writers. If losing builds character, Pat Conroy is your poster boy for also-rans.

"What was for these guys the worst year of their lives was in many ways the best year of my life," Conroy says by phone during a seaside vacation in Maine. "It was certainly the year I found myself, found out who I was and what I was going to do. And found belief in myself, which I don't think I ever had before that year."

Conroy was at a personal low point in 1996 when a former teammate stopped by his Dayton, Ohio, book signing for his most recent novel, Beach Music. On the cusp of the big 5-0, the author was in the middle of a messy divorce and seriously contemplating suicide ("I have a history of cracking up at least once during the writing of each of my last five books," he admits).

Somehow, reminiscing about glory days, even of such an inglorious season, seemed to lift his spirits. "The one thing I knew about basketball, despite how hard that year was, is that nothing has ever brought me joy like playing basketball," he says.

Conroy spent the next year dropping in on his former teammates, picking their memories to reconstruct a season most had worked hard to forget. Playing under a tyrannical old-school coach had spoiled the game for many of them; few had even bothered to stay in touch after graduation. "I ruined their lives reliving this. They were in agony talking about this year!" he says, letting loose his distinctive Irish chuckle.

For Conroy, however, even a dysfunctional team had been a welcome respite from the desensitizing plebe system at The Citadel and a horrific upbringing under his abusive father, the tough-as-nails Marine fighter pilot who inspired The Great Santini (1976).

As unpleasant as the forced march through Palookaville had been for his teammates, it paled in comparison to their apprehension at actually appearing in one of Conroy's books. After all, here was the guy who had rather spectacularly alienated his family with The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides (1986), and lobbed a literary grenade at his alma mater with The Lords of Discipline (1980).

"None of them have read a word of [My Losing Season]," he admits. "It tickled me, they were so terrified of it. (Mimics locker room chat) 'Look what he did to his f—-ing school!' 'School? Look what he did to his old man!' Their wives are scared to death."

They needn't be. All of the Bulldogs come off as stouthearted and true, if considerably browbeaten by circumstance.

One memory from that long-ago campaign left Conroy speechless:

"I remember the East Carolina game as being the first game Mom and Dad ever saw me play college basketball. It was a big deal for me. And all I remember was how it ended up, with Dad putting me against the wall saying, 'You're s—-, son. Your team is s—-, your coach is s—-, you couldn't hold my jock on your best day.' It was a horrible scene, and I was 21 then, I wasn't a kid anymore.

"To go back to that game and find out I scored 25 points stunned me; I had assumed I'd scored two or three. It shocked me. I scored more points than anybody on either team. And when I wrote that, when I saw the box score, I said, I had a father who couldn't be proud of a son who scored 25 points in a college basketball game. What could I have done to earn the respect of that son of a bitch? It simply amazed me."

Equally amazing, Conroy reconciled with his father before the real Great Santini died in 1998.

"Yeah, we did. I was surprised. I hated him so badly when I was a child and when I was in college that I thought I would never speak to him again after college. It shocked people when we became friends," he recalls.

Conroy's life has taken a happier turn in recent years. At 56, he's married to fellow writer Cassandra King, whose first novel, The Sunday Wife, was published by Hyperion in September. They live on Fripp Island near Beaufort, South Carolina, the setting for most of his novels and the one place on earth Conroy considers home. He's hard at work on his next novel, set in Charleston and the mountains of North Carolina.

Though he wouldn't want to relive it, Conroy says the trials of his youth helped him withstand the barbs of critics.

"I always tell myself, would I rather get a bad review in The New York Times or report to my First Sergeant's room after evening mess? The answer is always the same. I think that being beat up as much as I was during my childhood is a great preparation for being a writer. To be a writer in America is a contact sport. You've got to be tough."

Jay Lee MacDonald is a writer based in Naples, Florida.

Novelist Sue Miller’s beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease is such a unique achievement that it is impossible to adequately praise it. Or accurately describe it.

But for starters, in fewer than 200 pages, Miller offers a moving, emotionally complex portrait of her father—and mother—and their contrasting influences on her life. She provides a fascinating, if disturbing, description of Alzheimer’s manifestations in the brain and body. And, almost as an aside, she writes interestingly about how she transmutes and transforms observed experiences drawn from her life into events and characters in her fine, luminous novels.

What Miller does not offer in The Story of My Father is anything resembling a step-by-step guide for the perplexed. "I wanted to write a book that talked about what it felt like to live through the illness with someone whom you love," Miller says during a call to her home in Boston. "I wanted to write in a clear way about what was going on in the illness but also about the sense of confusion and loss one experiences in trying to respond reasonably to an unreasonable person who was once a very reasonable person."

And this Miller certainly does. The course of her father’s Alzheimer’s disease is central to this narrative. But it is also oddly peripheral to the heart of the memoir. The real story in this quietly amazing book is Miller’s effort to understand and even sustain her emotional bond with her father.

Miller’s father, James Nichols, was a respected church historian at the University of Chicago and, nearing the end of his career, at Princeton. A deeply religious man, Nichols was, says Miller, "incredibly considerate of other people, in almost an abstract way. As I write in the book, in a certain sense he considered everyone equally, and that was a problem being a child of his."

Miller remembers when she was a child sometimes doing things with her father and "feeling his shyness and my shyness and this sense of great effort and work being together, that he was working very hard and I was working very hard. I think that’s unusual for a little girl to feel about her father."

By contrast, Miller’s mother, a poet, "was excessive in all she did." She seemed to demand and absorb all the family’s emotional energy. Yet it is clear from Miller’s memoir that her mother and father were, improbably, very much in love throughout their marriage.

"My mother was very difficult and demanding," Miller says, "but my father loved her through all that. Once or twice he spoke a little sharply to her, but that was it. Those were memorable occasions because that was all, ever. I’m sure there were times when things were hard for him, but he understood life as a series of loving obligations. That’s what being as deeply Christian as he was can do for you—it makes burdens feel light. [He believed] there are few things which can give as much joy, as much meaning to life as doing something for someone else that you know no one else can do. I think my parents had a very intensely loving relationship."

Miller herself seems to have remained somewhat distant from her father until after her mother’s death. Ironically, she and her father began growing closer as Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroyed him. Since she was the sibling who lived nearest to him, Miller saw him most frequently and seems to have been the primary decision-maker overseeing his care. She describes his decline and her reactions to this decline with directness, intelligence, even humor, which lends an unexpected poignancy to the book.

Miller’s father died in 1991. For 10 years she struggled to write about who he was and what his life and death meant to her. In the meantime, she also wrote three novels that she believes were affected to some degree by her work on this memoir. The novel The Distinguished Guest, for instance, is "very much about the death of a parent," she says. And in The World Below "there is sense of the lives of the people we love who have gone before us running underneath our own lives" that derives in part from thinking and writing about her father.

Miller says writing the memoir seemed to prolong her grief. "I felt when I finally finished the book that I had finished something in myself too, that some way of being with him in my grieving was done and my sense of inadequacy as a caregiver was done. This is sort of an apologia for myself as a caregiver. I was still enmeshed in what I hadn’t done right while I was writing this book, and that was hard.

"I was so bitter and angry for a long time—on his behalf," Miller says near the end of our conversation. "The disease was just so cruel, particularly to someone who had lived by his intellect. What I slowly came to terms with, by really thinking about my father as I wrote the book, was that that was not a bitterness he would have shared. That helped me let go and be less furious at the illness. There was a kind of softening of my very dark anger. That is something I learned from my father, and from writing about him."

Jacques Pepin walks very softly in an era of the big schtick. He does not wham, or "Bam!" (although he is generous to his more flamboyant colleagues: "After all, Emeril Lagasse has done a lot to introduce people to food and to the fun of cooking"). He prefers to inspire rather than to dazzle and has been teaching at the French Culinary Institute in New York and Boston University for more than 30 years.

Pepin still loves to cook and says that "if I don't cook for two or three days, I get edgy." Despite his classical training in the kitchens of France, he maintains that he found his own style in the anti-artifice revolution of nouvelle cuisine. "My tastes have remained simple," he writes.

And finally, there is the sense of spiritual as well as physical nourishment that pervades his cooking shows. Here's a guy in touch with his feminine side. "I realized," he writes, "although I had worked mostly with men in the great restaurants of Paris and New York, the sort of cooking I was now turning to had been shown to me by women. It was the type of cooking I most loved." So naturally, the man Julia Child calls "the best chef in America" has modestly titled his memoir The Apprentice.

After 21 cookbooks, including the landmark La Technique and The Art of Cooking, Pepin has produced a characteristically gentle reminiscence of his "Life in the Kitchen," as the subtitle has it. It ranges back to his boyhood in his mother's various restaurants (and his escapades of stealing fruit with his brother), through his years learning sauces, grill techniques and stocks in some of the most famous restaurants of two countries: Le Meurice and the Plaza Athenee, Le Pavillon and his own Midtown Manhattan "soup kitchen," La Potagerie.

Public TV viewers who remember the video of Pepin bicycling to the market to fill his handlebar basket will be charmed to know that it's a sort of quiet tribute to his mother, who worked as a waitress supporting three small sons while her husband was off in the army during World War II: "[Riding] an old bicycle with solid rubber tires (no inner tubes) . . . she pedaled thirty-five or forty miles, going from farm to farm, filling the wicker basket strapped on the back of her bicycle with bread, eggs, meat, chicken, honey anything that she could find that would help feed us." With this background, it is not surprising that Pepin is a champion of food that is good from the bottom up, so to speak: fresh, healthful and prepared with an appreciation of its true nature rather than its "star quality."

"You know, a lot is said these days about great chefs, but not enough is said about the farmers," he said recently from his office in the French Culinary Institute. "Food should taste of what it is, as well as of how it has been transformed. Both things are worthwhile. If you have a nice piece of pork, and you roast it and maybe serve it with a little sauce, it has its own character. And if you add some shallots and some mushrooms and cognac and make a pate, that is also delicious. But it must have quality, and the cook must respect that."

On the other hand, Pepin is astonished at the wastefulness of modern-day chefs, and says that he was recently at one of those celebrity chef extravaganzas in California. "There were like 20 chefs, and when I went into the kitchen, I went crazy. A slightly wilted piece of broccoli or a bruised piece of basil and they threw it away. Frankly, I'd like to do a series on 'garbage food,' just using what most people waste."

His own cooking "was always pretty straightforward, but you have to remember that I started my apprenticeship in 1949, and we still had [ration] tickets for sugar and meat and eggs. A chicken was a big deal." The recipes that are scattered through the memoir, from a Reuben sandwich and New England clam chowder to braised rabbit, are examples of what he calls his "modern American cuisine with strong French influences." And yet none will frighten the amateur chef.

Apprenticed at 13, Pepin has cooked high and low. Having survived naval KP to become personal chef to de Gaulle before emigrating to New York, he turned down the position of chef to the Kennedy White House to take a job re-inventing the corporate kitchen for (the real) Howard Johnson. And he very nearly gave it all up for the life of an academic, lacking only the thesis for his doctorate in French literature from Columbia, even though he'd had to begin by taking English classes. He became a close friend of Craig Claiborne, James Beard, Alice Waters and of course the ebullient Child. He consulted on the creation of the Windows on the World.

Then in 1974, a car crash left him with multiple fractures. It was during his slow convalescence that he stumbled onto consulting, teaching, writing and doing television.

In fact, Pepin is about to tape a new series. "I wanted to call it, 'My Fast Food,' to show how to make simple, good but quick family food, but the producers didn't like it; so I don't know what to call it." It will be his 14th series, but the phenomenon of the celebrity chef is still a marvel to Pepin. "When I was coming up, you know, 50 years ago, being a chef was pretty low on the social scale. A good mother would have wanted her son to be a doctor or a lawyer."

Eve Zibart is a writer for The Washington Post.

Bibliophile Paul Collins finds a town that shares his passion If you’re reading this, you probably love books to one degree or another. For Paul Collins, author of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books, that love is taken to the nth degree. His passion for all things biblio led him to Hay-on-Wye, a small Welsh village on the Britain/Wales border with only 1,500 inhabitants and 40 antiquarian bookstores. “There are easily several million books secreted away in these stores,” Collins explains, “and in outlying barns around the town; thousands of books for every man, woman, child and sheepdog.” Leaving behind a comfortable cosmopolitan existence in San Francisco, Collins traveled with his wife Jennifer and their young son, Morgan, “across the pond” to buy a house, settle in the country and make “The Town of Books” their home. Sixpence House is the result of that journey, but it is more than a delightful travelogue of the family’s adventure. It is the story of books themselves: how they get written, read, or not read, how they come into print and fall out of print, how they are made and how they are destroyed. And, last but not least, it is the story of how a young couple, their child in tow, became brave enough to follow their dreams. “I’ve always wanted to write,” Collins says happily. “Ever since I was a kid, that’s what I wanted to do, and I’m getting to do it. It’s wonderful.” Making life even more wonderful is a wife who has also been bitten by the book bug. “Jennifer is a painter,” Paul explains, “but she writes as well. She’s just finished a young adult book and is now to the point of looking for an agent.” While a quaint, obscure little village crammed to the rooftops with books might seem the perfect place for a couple of artistic wordsmiths, the idyllic setting proves to be a difficult place to buy that “perfect” home. First of all, the buildings in Hay-on-Wye are old, and secondly, determining the condition of a home for sale is up to the buyer. This compels them to commission, and pay for, an engineering survey for any house they seriously consider purchasing. “In America, you can pretty much house hunt for free until you get to the point of signing on the dotted line,” Collins notes, “but in Britain and Wales it gets very expensive very quickly.” Tagging along from an armchair on this side of the pond, however, is great fun for the reader: “Heavy oak floorboards creak beneath our feet,” Collins writes, “immediately to our left is a dark and crowded stairwell. This is a weighty structure, the sort of moany old house under constant compression by the very years themselves; it is not airy.” Collins describes the kitchen of this particular house with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek humor as “distinctly of 1950 vintage; you half expect an Angry Young Man with a Yorkshire accent to step out and start yelling about working down in the bloody mines.” In storybook fashion, as their money supply dwindles Collins gets a job working for the self-proclaimed “King of Hay,” a man named Richard Booth, a book dealer and the owner of Hay Castle where Collins finds himself employed to sort through a veritable realm of books. The task is daunting, but the job does allow him to pursue one of his favorite pastimes: meandering from one idea to another. “I’m always going off on tangents,” he admits. “I see something and I go, ‘Oh, that looks interesting,’ and in the process of tracking one story I end up finding five others. So I’m never lacking for material. But because of that, I have a hard time imagining myself writing a strictly single subject book. I’ve decided that’s not what my talent is in. It’s more in throwing myself out there in several directions and hoping that other people will find it interesting as well.” His first book, Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen People Who Didn’t Change the World, capitalized on that same talent. “I guess I have a short attention span,” he says, laughing. “Any one of those 13 people could have warranted a book, but I’d rather write about the 13 and let someone else write about one particular person.” This meandering method works well for Sixpence House. It allows the author to wander off the path, stopping for an anecdote here, a poignant moment there; it allows him time to dust off a book for us, and let us glimpse the ideas and emotions of someone long-forgotten, their words, held in ink, still able to move our minds and hearts; it allows him to tell us stories within his story and to make a quiet, but undeniable statement about the power, the endurance, and the magic of books. But how does a bibliophile feel about computers? “I think computers are a blessing and a headache,” Collins says. “I use computers and databases a lot in my historical research. They’re a tremendous tool, but on the other hand, you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. And they’re a very unstable medium.” But with Sixpence House written and another book in the works, Paul Collins feels good about the future of his obsession and his livelihood. “Paper lasts for hundreds of years,” he says confidently. “I think books are here to stay. Not only do they have an aesthetic pleasure to them, they’re cheap, they’re portable, and they last a long time.” That should make any lover of books sleep a little more soundly tonight! Linda Stankard is a writer in New York.

As preface to his remarkably honest memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, best-selling novelist E. Lynn Harris offers this epigram: "Work like you don’t need the money, dance like nobody is watching and love like you’ve never been hurt."

Similar grand passions sweep across the pages and back through the years as the ebullient Harris recounts his former double life: by day, the quintessential "buppie," pulling down big bucks as an IBM computer salesman; by night, a closeted gay man searching for storybook love in the callous shadows of the urban club scene.

Hard work, a passion for soul music and the staunch resolve to remain a hopeless romantic enabled him to overcome depression, a suicide attempt and the loss of numerous friends to AIDS. His is a cautionary tale about a cautionless time, an era that fortunately allowed gentle souls such as Harris a few bad choices. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted is not a question here, but an affirmation, perhaps even a prayer.

Not many new writers would have the audacity to offer up their memoirs at the tender age of 48. Then again, Harris’ life has been far from ordinary and closer in truth to his eight larger-than-life multiracial, multi-sexual romances, including Invisible Life (1991), Abide with Me (1999) and Any Way the Wind Blows (2001). Harris actually embarked upon his memoirs seven years earlier, both to exorcise his demons and to satisfy fans curious to know where his real life ends and his fiction begins.

"Even as I was spending the last seven years going through my past, people kept saying, why now?" he says by phone from his Atlanta home. "It was very difficult because every time I would go back and write it and read what I had written, I had to relive that part of my life, where now life is so good. I guess that makes you stronger in a lot of ways."

Growing up poor in the shadow of his abusive stepfather Ben in Little Rock, Arkansas, Harris developed an early ability to turn adversity into advantage, lemons into lemonade. The temperamental Ben always called him Mike, after a neighborhood tough, preferring it to his "sissy" given name, Everette Lynn. Harris recounts one Easter when Ben went into a rage and ripped the boy’s brand new Sunday suit because he had buttoned the jacket "like a little girl." His mother and three sisters, dressed in their Easter finery, could only look on in horror.

"At some point in each of our lives we realize that life is not necessarily going to be fair," the author says. "That was the day for me that I knew I was going to have to pick up some skills to survive." When life got messy, he would retreat into the refuge of his imagination, a lush, passionate world far removed from Little Rock. One of the first black students to attend the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the gregarious Harris excelled, becoming the first black cheerleader and yearbook editor. After graduation, IBM recruited him for a sales position in Dallas, where he was once again the oddity, a young black liberal arts grad in an office of older white engineers. It was another world, a white heterosexual world, but one he would conquer with his natural salesmanship. He set his sights on a six-figure salary by age 29; he achieved it at 26.

Harris recalls being suddenly assigned to host two corporate CEOs on a high-stakes junket to San Francisco, a mission for which he was woefully unprepared at 23. Halfway through the first-class flight west, he turned to the two industry titans and admitted that he didn’t have a clue about what he was doing.

"It really helped me a lot because they taught me and they had a great time," he says.

By day, Harris was a straight arrow; by night, he was carefully exploring the gay bars wherever he found himself: Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C. It was the height of the disco era. Although Harris loved the nightlife, it didn’t love him back.

"One of the group used to jokingly refer to me as such a Mary Tyler Moore-type of person, and that was from my Southern upbringing," he says. "Everybody wanted me to be their little brother; they wanted me as a friend. I don’t know if it was the angels protecting me but a lot of these men that I would have jumped at the chance to be intimate with later died [of AIDS]."

"I was basically still trying to be Mr. All-American who just happened to be gay; I mean, the things that I was interested in sports, the theater and dating I wanted it to be romantic. And I kept getting messages like, hey, you don’t get to be romantic in this life. I just could not believe it was all about sex."

The high life did offer temporary relief from chronic depression, but at a heavy cost. Shortly after his 1990 suicide attempt, Harris sobered up, moved to Atlanta and began writing a fictionalized account of his life as a gay black man. When his manuscript for Invisible Life elicited no response from New York publishers, he published it himself and shrewdly placed it in beauty parlors and bookstores where he knew he would find an audience for his thoroughly modern romances.

"Some people can’t understand women going crazy over me at my signings, almost like a rock star, knowing my sexuality. I think it’s because they know my heart and we’ve been through a lot of the same things together."

Harris applauds the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay rights and the growing acceptance of gay marriage.

"I think that the move by the Supreme Court is a real relief. I just hope that people will take it slow. Sometimes so much injury can be done when people feel they are being forced to do something or accept something. I think it’s hard for straight people to understand what it’s like to be gay, but I think more of them are willing to open their minds about the individuals."

If he could, would he change his sexual preference? "No. Ask me that three or four years ago, it might have been different. If a genie came and granted me a wish of not being gay, would I take it? Yes, if it was a genie, because that would be fantasy. If God came, I would say no because that is obviously the way he wanted me."

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

Amy Tan had fervidly hoped to publish her fifth novel this fall, but fate would not allow it. Tan, who exploded onto the world literary stage with The Joy Luck Club in 1989, had just returned from a four-month worldwide tour in June 2001 promoting her fourth best-selling novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, when she knew something was very, very wrong. She was plagued by insomnia and an overwhelming sense of dread. Her body shook from an internal vibration she came to refer to as "Dolby Digital Syndrome." She could not read, write or follow the thread of dinner conversations.

Doctors ultimately diagnosed and removed a tumor on her adrenal gland. Her Dolby buzz subsided, only to be replaced by full-blown hallucinations, once a week at first, eventually every day. Some days, she couldn’t remember her own phone number or even her name.

That’s when fate, or something like it, took an unlikely form: Madonna.

In November 2002, Tan was scheduled to debut a new musical number, "Material Girl," with The Rock Bottom Remainders, the all-author rock band that includes Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Barbara Kingsolver and Dave Barry, among others. The Remainders previously had used Tan’s limited vocal abilities to comedic effect on the Nancy Sinatra chestnut, "These Boots Were Made for Walkin’," with the diminutive Tan decked out in full dominatrix garb. In her new spotlight turn, she planned to one-up Madonna in the guise of a money-grubbing Enron wife.

After 13 hours of study, she could not remember even the first line of the song. Her band mates downplayed it—hey, everybody has their "half-heimers" episodes—and she eventually read her way through the number onstage.

"That was a really scary moment," she admits by phone from her San Francisco home. "I knew there was something desperately wrong with my brain right then, that realization that you know it’s Alzheimer’s or you’re losing your mind or you’re going to be a dimwit."

In fact, Tan had unknowingly contracted Lyme disease, the degenerative tick-born illness, three years earlier, shortly before her mother’s death.

Its effects have been devastating on Tan’s ability to distill her life experiences into the funny, moving portraits of mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese-American experience for which she is known worldwide. She has learned how to move her story ahead on the good days and resist tinkering with every sentence the way she still loves to do.

"What I feel I have to do now, when my mind is clear, is just get the story out, the continuity, because that’s what I find very, very difficult on days when my brain is clogged, which comes from brain inflammation," she says. "I have a hard time with continuity, with segues and keeping pieces together. It feels like I have 12 pieces of fruit and vegetables being thrown in the air and trying to juggle them all. It’s overwhelming."

When it was clear that no novel would be forthcoming this year, Tan’s editor suggested publishing a collection of pieces she’d already written. To the author’s surprise, a search turned up numerous essays, speeches and the like.

The problem was, Tan has a strong distaste for "hodge-podge collections" that have no unifying theme. But as fate would have it, she had just recently recognized the common thread running through her own work.

"It has to do with my upbringing with a father who very strongly believed in faith as a Baptist minister, and my mother, who very strongly believed in fate, and I’m trying to find things that work for me."

She proposed a collection based upon her lifelong search for a philosophical middle ground between faith and fate, to be called The Opposite of Fate. When her puzzled editor asked her what the opposite of fate might be, Tan cryptically replied, "Exactly!"

The Opposite of Fate captures a life fully lived in 32 chapters, from Tan’s award-winning essay at age 8 to her unlikely adolescence in Switzerland (her first day on skis, she almost collided with the Queen of Sweden) to the ghost in her San Francisco condo who whistles the theme to Jeopardy to the filming of The Joy Luck Club and Tan’s amusement at encountering the Cliff Notes edition of her first novel.

Pivotal in Tan’s life and career were her mother, a complex, neurotic pessimist who believed in ghosts and spirits; her father and brother, who died within months of each other from brain tumors; the death of a close friend whose voice spoke to her for months after his murder, and the Remainders, who showed her how to boogie.

Tan calls The Opposite of Fate "a book of musings" rather than an actual memoir. That designation is a fair compromise to describe this loose and rambling autobiography that is weighted heavily toward the things that matter most to Tan.

"I’ve only had one life and these are the aspects of my life that I continue to dwell upon," she explains. "We as writers, when we talk about what our oeuvre is, we go back to the same questions and the same pivotal moments in our lives and they become the themes in our writing."

Tan doesn’t blame her illness on fate, despite her mother’s daily warnings of a curse on the family, but she does allow that such a curse did exist "because my mother strongly believed in it and she passed it on to my brother and me."

An equally strong belief in free will and self-determinism that she inherited from her father helped Tan "take that attitude of a curse into one of extreme good luck. I have been so incredibly lucky in life, beyond what I ever would have wished."

These days, Tan is wishing for more clear days. They will find her racing ahead with her uplifting stories of family foibles and the precarious yin-yang of the Chinese-American experience, or perhaps skiing down the gentle slopes of Squaw Valley and Vail.

This month, she plans to be back on stage with the Remainders in Austin, Texas, knee-high boots and leather whip at the ready, to show that Texas Book Fair crowd just what this literary dominatrix is made of.

Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

When the family maid took seven-year-old Marshall Chapman to see Elvis Presley in concert, the wide-eyed daughter of a prosperous Spartanburg, South Carolina, textile family formed a permanent, private bond with the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. But unlike the thousands of swooning, screaming prepubescent debs-to-be in attendance at that 1956 matinee, the impish blonde with the iron resolve didn’t simply long to marry the King—she wanted to be him.

That was a popular daydream in those heady early days of rock if you were male, that is. Young ladies of Chapman’s breeding, however, were expected to matriculate in the finest finishing schools, there to master the homemaker’s arts and become wives, mothers and members of the Junior League.

Chapman recalls the moment she firmly pointed her red cowboy boots down the road less traveled.

"One of the most important decisions I ever made was telling everybody I was going to Vanderbilt University because it was in Nashville, and this is where I live now," she says by phone from Music City. "My parents didn’t want me to go there; they wanted me to go to a Virginia school like Hollins or Sweet Briar or Agnes Scott in Atlanta, and they took me to all of those schools." Parents James and Martha Chapman naturally feared their second of four children would fall in with the wrong element in Nashville artists, musicians, free thinkers and such.

Chapman, for one, was counting on it.

Three decades later, with eight albums, a few broken hearts and a stage career that flirted with fame behind her, Chapman recounts her wilder days in Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, a fond if fragmented look back at the more-or-less ongoing party that was the 1970s. Using a dozen of her songs as entry points, the rocker reveals the funky, drug-laced craziness behind the music. A succession of "speed freak boyfriends" contributed to the emotional wear-and-tear that eventually led her to check herself into an Arizona treatment center in 1988, at age 39. She retired from the road for good five years ago.

But it was one wild ride while it lasted.

When Chapman left Vandy and strapped on her electric guitar, she was an imposing figure: she topped six feet in her cowboy boots, unleashed an untamed mane of blond curls and belted out "grrrl rock" long before Patti Smith or Chrissie Hynde.

Nashville songwriters such as Waylon Jennings, Bob McDill and Harlan Howard frequently sat in on her sets at the Jolly Ox, where Chapman defied convention by ignoring the Top 40 in favor of headier tunes by Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and John Prine. When Jennings and Nelson hit it big with college audiences, Chapman found herself swept up in the Outlaw movement.

"I was like the kid sister," she chuckles. "When I describe myself as Gidget goes to Nashville, it was really true. I was like, Oh wow, these guys actually think about their lives and write songs about it!’ I wasn’t writing songs when I first met them." Nashville at the dawn of the ’70s provided ample material for budding songwriters; the challenge was remembering it the next day. Chapman wrote her first significant song, "Rode Hard and Put Up Wet," one summer morning in 1973 after awakening facedown in her front-yard vegetable patch clad only in her underpants, following a boozy night watching John Prine at a well-known Nashville nightspot, the Exit/In.

If female rock and rollers were scarce in those days, female songwriters were unheard of.

"It was almost like a clubhouse with a big sign on the door that says No Girls Allowed," she recalls. "I ran with these guys I would swarm’ with them as Waylon used to put it and I was accepted and would sit around with them at the guitar pulls, but nobody would give me a publishing deal." Undeterred, Chapman started her own publishing company, Enoree Music, named after the river that flowed through her family’s textile plant.

Chapman’s solo albums met with critical praise but dismal sales. No one, it seems, could quite categorize this Amazonian blues-rock-guitar-slinging-Farrah-Fawcett-bad-girl-songwriter.

There was another way to make it in Nashville, of course. "There were women who had boyfriend producers. I was just adamant about never having a boyfriend be my producer, and now looking back upon it, I think I might have hit the big time if I had gone along with that. But I didn’t want to lose control of my music." Chapman finally crashed the boy’s club in 1984 when newcomers Sawyer Brown recorded one of her songs.

"When my first hit, Betty’s Bein’ Bad,’ was in the list for CMA Song of the Year, out of 120 songs, two were written by women Betty’s Being Bad’ and Rosanne Cash’s Hold On.’ When you see that ballot today, it’s about half and half. That is an amazing change." Chapman is a familiar figure to fans of chief Parrothead Jimmy Buffett; she has played in his Coral Reefer Band, toured as his opening act and even holed up on a sailboat in Key West writing "The Perfect Partner" for his Last Mango in Paris album. "I love Buffett. He’s one-third musician, one-third Huey Long and one-third P.T. Barnum," she says.

Chapman credits novelists Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, with whom she co-wrote the musical revue Good Ol’ Girls, for encouraging her to write her unorthodox memoir. "The word autobiography makes me cringe, just the presumptuousness of it: I was born a poor sharecropper’s child,’ whatever," she says.

Had she become a major star, it’s doubtful her memoir would have been half as revealing. Chapman figures the odds are good she wouldn’t even have lived to write it.

"Rosanne [Cash] has a T-shirt that says, Fame Kills.’ I think I’d probably be dead if everything that I wanted to happen at the time had happened back in the late ’70s because I didn’t know how to take care of myself out there. I was way too open. Fame would have eaten me alive."

Jay MacDonald, a writer in Oxford, Mississippi, has been on the bus with Willie Nelson but insists he didn’t exhale.

On October 15, 2002, Sam Waksal, disgraced founder of ImClone, pal of Martha Stewart and the poster boy of corporate fraud, pleaded guilty to six federal charges. Sitting in the back of the New York courtroom, wondering why he had come, was Waksal’s onetime friend and admirer David Denby, movie critic for The New Yorker. In the end, Denby decided to step from the crowd and shake the hand of the man he calls "an American fool for the ages."

Denby’s handshake is the near-final act in a three-year drama that began when Denby’s wife, novelist Cathleen Schine, asked for a divorce and he set out to make a million dollars in the high-tech stock boom. Denby’s stated goal was to gain enough money to hold onto the New York apartment where the couple had raised their two sons. But as Denby makes abundantly clear in American Sucker, his month-by-month account of this period, he was also seized by the stock market mania that gripped much of the nation at that time. "When Cathy left, I became irrationally exuberant so as not to be dead," he writes, deftly borrowing Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s memorable cautionary phrase.

Denby is essentially a moralist, and his tone is often a sadder-but-wiser one. He argues with himself about the nature of greed, about values and materialism, about the new economy and what it might mean. He quotes St. Augustine and Thorstein Veblen as easily as Internet analyst Henry Blodgett (an acquaintance he cultivates), former SEC chair Arthur Levitt or the financial press. In between, he has a little to say about fatherhood, the life of a movie critic and, yes, even sex. There are moments when Denby overplays his narrative hand, but these are the forgivable lapses of a good and perceptive writer. Denby writes that his is a "commonplace American journey." To which I must respectfully say . . . balderdash. I mean, when was the last time you lost $900,000 in the stock market? No, we read American Sucker because it is a brighter, more dramatic story than our own. And we weep, probably with relief, perhaps with glee.

Orange crates sealed with bumper stickers float, but not for long. So John Pollack discovered when he built his first boat at age six. Far from being discouraged, the young boy decided that someday, he’d build a boat from something that couldn’t sink: corks. Over the next 25 years, Pollack pursued other dreams, working as a White House speechwriter and a foreign correspondent in Spain, but he never stopped saving corks. His new book, Cork Boat, is a lively, memorable account of the attempt to make his dream a reality.

The Cork Boat project began in earnest in 1999. "I wanted to start the new century with a big project, and the time seemed ripe to launch the boat," Pollack tells BookPage over the phone from his New York City apartment. He’d found a business partner in Garth Goldstein, an architectural student whose design expertise would be crucial to the boat’s success. Realizing they’d never save enough corks on their own, Pollack and Goldstein printed out flyers and handed them out to local restaurants and bars, asking them to save their corks for the project. Pollack was met with one of two reactions: immediate excitement and support, or a blank stare. Neither fazed him. "If you’re building a cork boat, you can’t take yourself too seriously, because it’s such a goofy project. And I think that if you can laugh at yourself, other people are willing to laugh with you."

To build the boat, Pollack and Goldstein designed a honeycomb "cell" of corks rubber-banded together in the shape of a hexagon. These cells would be bound together to form logs, which in turn would construct the Viking-like ship. To help band the corks together—first at Pollack’s kitchen table, then in the garage of Goldstein’s rented house, soon dubbed the Mount Pleasant Boat Works—Pollack used his way with words to recruit friends and neighbors, holding boat-building parties late into the night. He solicited help from the California-based Cork Supply, USA, which generously donated many of their test corks to help Pollack and Goldstein collect the 165,000 corks that they would need to complete the project. Still, building the boat was much more complicated than Pollack had imagined.

"The most unexpected aspect of the whole project was how hard it was. There were several times where I thought, this is impossible. And there were several times when I felt like quitting. My mom was instrumental in saying, ‘you can’t quit, not now if you do you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’ And mom was right."

The hard work of so many people paid off when, in April of 2002, Cork Supply called with a proposal: would Pollack and Goldstein be willing to come to Portugal in June and sail the boat down the Douro River? It wasn’t the wine country route that Pollack had originally envisioned, but he enthusiastically agreed. He and Goldstein spent the next two months in furious production, putting finishing touches on the boat and correcting problems they’d noticed during the boat’s first launch on the Potomac the previous October. But once again, the difference between dreams and reality gave the team a wake-up call. The trip, far from the idyll Pollack had imagined, "ended up being 17 days of hard rowing," he admits ruefully. "But the struggle made it all the more worthwhile; if it had been easy, it wouldn’t have been so meaningful."

Pollack’s evocative description of the ups and downs of his remarkable journey creates an unusual memoir of one man’s struggle to live a childhood dream. He hopes it will inspire others to do the same. "One of the reasons I wrote Cork Boat was because I wanted to story to live. Years from now, someone’s going to be looking for a book to read, and they’ll see Cork Boat, pull it off the shelf and read the story, and the journey will continue."

African orphan transforms the life of a foreign correspondent Neely Tucker, a foreign correspondent for The Detroit Free Press and Knight Ridder, was transferred in 1997 from his post as a roving reporter in Eastern Europe to Zimbabwe. When he wasn’t traveling on assignment in war-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa, Tucker and his wife, Vita, volunteered at an orphanage in the capital city of Harare.

The orphanage, probably the best in the country, was woefully underfunded. A shocking number of infants fell sick and died. Tucker and his wife began to care for one of the most gravely ill of these children, an infant girl named Chipo (which means "gift" to the Shona-speaking majority of Zimbabweans) who had been abandoned in a field just moments after she was born. Very quickly, the childless couple decided to adopt Chipo.

Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir is Tucker’s completely absorbing account of the couple’s efforts to overcome both a maddening social service bureaucracy and a deep cultural prejudice against foreign adoptions and gain Chipo as their daughter. Good writer that he is, Tucker also tells a story of larger and deeper human transformations.

"To say that this is an adoption book or a book about Africa is like saying The English Patient is about Egypt and World War II," Tucker says during a call to his desk at The Washington Post, where he has been a staff writer since returning from Zimbabwe in 2000. "Egypt and the war frame the experiences of the characters in that novel, just as the adoption and Africa framed my experiences. But what I hope people will understand this book to be about is a time in your life when you put everything on the table, when you just risk everything."

One of the most important things Tucker risked for Chipo and Vita was his career as a journalist. Being a reporter, Tucker says, "was not just a job I showed up to do. It was my life." And Tucker was not merely a journalist, but one of those rare journalists who sought the toughest assignments, who "had the working idea that there was a higher form of truth to be found in the world’s most impoverished and violent places, a rough-hewn honesty that could not be found elsewhere." As a result, some of the most horrifying and exalted moments in Love in the Driest Season are Tucker’s brief narratives about people and events he witnessed in war zones in Eastern Europe and Africa.

The decision to adopt Chipo complicated Tucker’s dedication to his work as a foreign correspondent. "I just didn’t think it was the responsible thing to do to spend my time that way anymore. The third time you’re in Bujumbura staying in the same crappy hotel doing another story that will run on page A15 while your only child in this life learns to smile or walk or has her first day in school, you start asking yourself why you’re doing this."

At the same time, the political situation in Zimbabwe was becoming darker. According to Tucker, Zimbabwe has long been considered "Africa 101. That is, it was as easy as Africa gets. The country worked pretty well, the literacy rate was pretty high, the hospitals were OK, you could go to the grocery store, pay with your credit card and get just about everything off the shelf there that you can get here." Beneath the social veneer, however, unnoticed by the casual tourist, AIDS was decimating extended families, which more or less functioned as the country’s social support network; families, hospitals and orphanages were overwhelmed. New and popular political parties challenged the corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe and Mugabe reacted by going after the messengers. Foreign journalists were intimidated. Tucker’s phone was tapped and his family was threatened. Not wanting to jeopardize the adoption, Tucker began to avoid reporting about Zimbabwe. "I think I’m harsher on myself than anybody at Knight Ridder would be," he says, "but from my standpoint, my career went down the tubes. Not in something I did but in something I didn’t do. I didn’t write untrue stories, but I just didn’t do my job." Tucker eventually took a leave of absence to complete the adoption.

The adoption transformed Tucker, but that is not the only transformation in this story. Tucker was born in the poorest county in Mississippi and as a child attended an all-white private academy. When, as a reporter, he was hired by the Free Press and moved to Detroit, he met and eventually married Vita, an African-American widow who remembered Mississippi from childhood trips as a place so "bad that as a black person from Detroit, you were actually grateful to get to Alabama." Neither family was thrilled with the marriage, but Tucker’s was the more resistant. "I told Vita when we got married that I never expected to be reunited with my family, and Vita said, well, you might just be surprised,’ " Tucker remembers. Because of her religious conviction, his mother eventually got a passport and flew for 14 hours to Poland, where the couple was living while Tucker covered Eastern Europe, and apologized to Vita. His father changed with the arrival of Chipo.

"My father had been abandoned by his old man when he was two days old, and he just identified immediately with Chipo," Tucker says. "He’s not a touchy-feely guy. He doesn’t talk about his emotions. He was a guy who had been abandoned by his father and had mentioned it only once to my mother. And he just took to Chipo."

Tucker writes in Love in the Driest Season that "race has been the defining issue of my life." In conversation, he says, "It would be silly not to be optimistic. From when and where I was raised and from when and where Vita was raised, it’s much better today, it’s insanely better, it’s ridiculously better."

And Chipo? She’s better too. "She knows absolutely everything about where she came from," Tucker says. "She’ll tell you she’s from Zimbabwe. She’ll tell you she’s a pretty girl from Africa. That’s how she’ll introduce herself." And that’s a happy ending to a pretty amazing story.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

The Sparks brothers recount a round-the-world adventure This experience started the way any Nicholas Sparks novel might a Notre Dame alumni brochure arrived at the author's North Carolina home advertising a three-week travel tour by private jet to see the world's most exotic sights: Machu Picchu in Peru, the stone heads of Easter Island, Ayers Rock in Australia, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, India's famed Taj Mahal, the rock cathedrals of Ethiopia, the Hypogeum in Malta and the northern lights of Tromso, Norway.

Sparks, an admitted Type A personality, was deep into the writing of Nights in Rodanthe in the spring of 2002 amid the merry daily cacophony of three sons, twin daughters, barking dogs and parcel deliveries. Drop it all for a trip around the world? Sure, he thought, maybe someday.

But he couldn't shake the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. When his wife Cathy pragmatically begged off but encouraged him to enlist his brother Micah instead, the stage was set for Three Weeks with My Brother, a poignant, funny and ultimately life-affirming family memoir/travelogue that only the Sparks brothers could have written.

Fans of Nicholas Sparks' novels The Notebook, Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, A Bend in the Road may be surprised to learn that the author's life has known the same emotional turmoil he brings so vividly to life in his fiction. By their mid-30s, the Sparks brothers had lost their mother at 47 to a freak horse-riding accident, their kid sister Dana to brain cancer and their father to a traffic accident. They were the lone surviving members of a family that had managed to rise from Nebraska poverty to middle-class academia in Sacramento, California, and produce two sons who would prosper beyond their wildest expectations: Nicholas sold The Notebook for $1 million weeks before his 30th birthday; Micah parlayed a real estate career into several successful businesses.

It was time to put it all into perspective, to revisit the best and worst times of a past shared as best pals, track teammates, devil's advocates, constant supporters, and above all, brothers. It was time to celebrate their survival.

BookPage caught up with the Sparks brothers in a conference call; Nicholas spoke from North Carolina, Micah from his home in northern California.

Which came first, the trip or the idea for a book? "We kind of had an idea that we would write something together, so we both took notes the whole way through the trip," says Nicholas. "I mean, you're on an airplane for six and seven hours at a stretch, there are only so many bad movies you can watch." "We knew we would relate the story of our family and the brothers," Micah adds. "And of course we're on this magnificent trip around the world, so after we got back, we started working on how to weave the two stories together. That structure was the hardest thing about the book." Being suddenly alone together, away from their wives and families, put both brothers in a reflective mood.

"On Easter Island, we were on our way to see our first Moai (giant statue) and there were all these horses just running free and we both immediately thought about mom, it just hits you," says Nicholas. "She loved horses. She could spot a horse flying down the highway." But it didn't take long for their natural Wally-and-Beav playfulness to surface. In Three Weeks, the two revisit their favorite childhood pranks, from denuding a whole neighborhood of Christmas lights to blowing up mailboxes with supercharged fireworks to one particularly narrow brush with disaster in an abortive William Tell scenario.

On the trip, their inner kids grew restless and a bit punchy over all the antiquities. "It's a jar and a bowl!" says Nicholas. "We saw lots of jars and bowls." It was Micah who failed the Ayers Rock appreciation test: "Yeah, it's a big rock in the middle of Australia; they took us out there numerous times to look at the big rock before sunrise, after sunrise, in 105-degree heat with flies. In the end, it's one big rock in the middle of the desert." Their best moments were spent off the beaten path, in pubs and chatting with everyday people: cab drivers, waitresses, bellhops and the like. In Cambodia, where the devastation wrought by the Khmer Rouge has given rise to a young but vigorously upbeat population, they had an encounter they will never forget.

"We went through a high school it is now the Holocaust museum where they tortured people, and our tour guide had gone to that high school; his brother had become a Khmer Rouge, so they were on opposite sides," says Micah. "And for him to go back to his high school and see bloodstains on the floor and the spikes and the shackles . . . he had his whole family wiped out by the Khmer Rouge! But they still smile and have a sense of humor." The poverty of India still haunts them: "It blew me away to learn that India, which is just a little bigger than Texas, has one billion, 250 million people, five times our population, just smashed into this country with no resources," says Micah.

Once home, the brothers recreated the gut-wrenching family memories by exchanging faxes between coasts. Nicholas wrote Three Weeks from his own point of view, but most of the memories were shared and hard won. "There were scenes that were very hard for us to write," says Nicholas. "These are not memories we want to remember." For those, Nicholas and Micah can turn to their last night in Norway, arms intertwined in a local pub: "They had this song where the Norwegians would sing these long verses and then the Americans would shout out the chorus I can't tell you what it was, something in Norwegian and we would boom it out at the top of our lungs, and they would all crack up. So at the end they said, Hey, do you know what you were saying?' And we said no, and they said, It means, you're beautiful and I'm warm and naked.'" Micah laughs. "They have long nights in Norway and they enjoy them." Jay MacDonald belts a mean karaoke version of "Born on the Bayou."

The author of the bestsellers All I Need To Know I Learned from My Cat and My Dog's the World's Best Dog, Suzy Becker was proceeding with her career as a writer-illustrator when she was diagnosed in 1999 with a tumor that would require brain surgery. In a new illustrated memoir, I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse? Becker gives a poignant and funny account of her journey to recovery. Known for her starkly original perspective, Becker shares the story behind the book in the "interview" that follows.

Behind the Book: This new book is such a departure from your previous work did you ever consider calling it All I Need to Know I Learned from My CAT-scan? [We laugh.] Seriously, what inspired you to write it?

Me: I think it was the fourth or fifth day after the operation. I was laid up at home, recuperating from a bunionectomy, not officially back to work and the idea came to me. Kind of one of those eureka moments. I picked up the phone, called my editor. And I remember her reaction exactly: Bunion surgery?! No one's going to want to read a book about bunion surgery! I didn't agree, I still don't. I think people will read about anything if it's good or interesting or funny enough, but . . . a week later, there was a videotape in my mailbox. She had focus-grouped my book idea. The people in the focus group all wanted to read about brain surgery.

BTB: You got the idea from a focus group?

Me: Not really. But none of this is real—I'm making the whole interview up, as in there is no Behind the Book behind Behind the Book.

BTB: I'll go along. What inspired you to write the book, really?

Me: Not the obvious answer. . . . I never felt inspired to write this book, like I did with the cat or dog book; I felt compelled. At the time (May 1999), I was planning to write and illustrate an altogether different memoir, a book about my decision whether or not to have a baby. I had applied for a fellowship at Harvard to work on it in the fall. Three days after I found out I got the fellowship, I had the grand mal seizure that led to the diagnosis of the mass on my left parietal lobe and then the brain surgery. If everything had gone according to plan, I think I still would have written the other book. Maybe included a chapter on the brain surgery. But, the surgery, an awake craniotomy, which carried some risk to my upper-right-side mobility (my drawing hand) ended up unexpectedly messing up my language abilities: speech, reading and writing. No one knew how long the problems would last. Twenty-four hours stretched into 18 months. I went to Harvard in the fall anyway (two months after my surgery), commuting in to Boston for speech therapy, basically keeping to myself, and my notebook. I made notes about everything.

My handwriting and sentence formation were frighteningly crude right after the surgery (the actual notes are in the book), but by the fall, my notebook had become a source of comfort, a confidante. Forget about speech problems just saying the words "brain surgery" sucks the air out of a room. I talked to the notebook.

Eventually, I had to start working on a book. A colloquium (a word I was never able to say until after I left Harvard) presentation is the only requirement of the fellowship year. Mine was scheduled for March. The baby decision book was out of the question I was on birth-defect causing anti-seizure medication up through November. When I finally sat down to write, I was forced to write what I knew, and there was really only one topic I knew anything about.

BTB: You mentioned that people don't really want to talk about the subject. Were you worried that they wouldn't want to read about it?

Me: Sure. And I worried that there wasn't a book in it. Every day of the fellowship year, I wondered whether I would have thought any of it was funny if things had turned out worse. There was a Fellow across the hall whose sister had died of brain cancer the summer I had my surgery. Writing the book it took me three years was my recovery. I am grateful to Harvard and to Peter Workman for publishing it.

BTB: What about the baby decision book?

Me: What about the bunion surgery book?